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Is it really “Complex”? Or did we make it “Complicated”? (2014) [video]

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Re: Is it really “Complex”? Or did we make it “Complicated”? (2014) [video]

#61

Post by chubot »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #28
eternalban wrote: post #6

Alan Kay has had about a few decades to empirically demonstrate that "we" have willfully made it complicated. I don't believe he has done so.

Have you used OMeta? That came out ouf VPRI I believe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMeta . It is a really nice approach to constructing parsers and interpreters. Then there is "Open, extensible object models": https://www.recurse.com/blog/65-paper-of-the-week-open-exten... . Again by the same folks. Those are the one that come to mind when I think of simple and very powerful tools. There are many others. So I think…

I've read the OMeta paper, the object models paper, and most of the VPRI papers. I'm generally sympathetic to their point of view -- I hate bloated software.

But what has been built with these tools? If OMeta was really better, wouldn't we be using it to parse languages by now? They already have a successor Ohm, which is interesting, but I also think it falls short.

I'm searching desperately for a meta-language to describe my language, so I would use it if it were better.

I think they generally do the first 90%... but skip out on the remaining 90% (sic) you need to make something more generally useful and usable.

Re: Is it really “Complex”? Or did we make it “Complicated”? (2014) [video]

#62

Post by hardlianotion »

505 wrote: post #23
rjeli wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mathematica gets live code, data visualization, and ML, all with a lispy+tacit+functional syntax. I find it much more integrated and easy to use compared to Jupyter notebook, although it's near useless for anything imperative -- I find myself using Jupyter a lot these days to develop one-off scripts interactively. (please, no one mention stephen)

(I am pleased you brought up Stephen W, and also that you asked us not to. That's all you'll get from me.)

I would have called him the W-ster and respect parent's wishes

Re: Is it really “Complex”? Or did we make it “Complicated”? (2014) [video]

#63

Post by afarrell »

macinjosh wrote: post #40
elviejo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Javascript,nodejs, electron and HTML and CSS demostrated that "we" have made things complicated.

This is the first thing that came to my mind while watching the video. Web development has become so overly complicated. I believe it is mostly due to working around limitations of the platform and the lack of a de facto standard of how web development should be done. In contrast for smartphone development, largely speaking, the way to do it is the way Android and Apple provide. The web has no single vendor to dictat…

I think a lot of it is a lack of documentation. This has two effects.

1) People just get started and get used to not really understanding the interface they are working with. Who hasn't felt like they were playing whack-a-mole with CSS layout? This means lack of conceptual clarity fails isn't notable.

2) Nobody ends up noticing just how complex the rules are.

It was 9 years from when I started looking for a tutorial like http://book.mixu.net/css/ to when I actually found it. That is...really quite bad.

Re: Is it really “Complex”? Or did we make it “Complicated”? (2014) [video]

#64

Post by braveo »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #34

I haven't watched the video yet, so please forgive the possibly premature comment... But this is something that I've found myself thinking about a lot lately. Are the things that we're currently building or maintaining truly that complicated or are we over-engineering things? I've been humbled on more than one occasion where I initially thought an enterprise-y solution was over-engineered, until all the details of th…

Most things can be done in a less complicated manner, but it costs more.

Consider SAP. It's complicated to say the least, but a lot of that complexity comes from both it's generality, it's flexibility, and the quality of the solutions it solves underneath.

Any solution you write in SAP could be written in a much simpler manner using simpler tools, but doing so would and getting your solution to the quality of what you can get in SAP would be hugely expensive and take a lot of time.

In that way we subsidize each other, but in doing so, we often make things much more complicated than they strictly need to be to solve any particular problem.

Now this is a different class from things that are just shitty design. Those exist in abundance, and it's unfortunate, but that's life.

Re: Is it really “Complex”? Or did we make it “Complicated”? (2014) [video]

#65

Post by aethertron »

chriswarbo wrote: post #45
eternalban wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His critical error is evident in his comparative analysis that places Physics and Programming on the same level. The systems that underly natural sciences are givens . The entire kettle of soup of software complexity boils on the fact that software engineering must first create the 'terra firma' of computing. That is the root cause of the complexity in software: it lacks a physics.

I think it's the other way around: In physics, we don't know what the fundamental rules are, we can only see complicated outcomes and have to infer (guess) what the rules might be. In computing, we know what the fundamental rules are (universal computation; whether that's turing machines, lambda calculus, sk logic, etc. they're all equivalent in power), but we have to deduce what the complicated outcomes are.

>In computing, we know what the fundamental rules are

In a limited way. Because we're making systems that involve people. Important and relevant aspects of human nature must go far deeper than our present understanding.

Re: Is it really “Complex”? Or did we make it “Complicated”? (2014) [video]

#66

Post by noir_lord »

goatlover wrote: post #2

I wonder what a Smalltalk-like environment would look like if had been developed in the 2000s instead of the 1970s. If you could marry up the advantages of text/files, live code, visual layouts, data visualization and perhaps machine learning in the future, maybe you could come up with a huge jump in productivity and being able to handle complexity.

Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon_(operating_system)

It never caught on but it was an interesting path not taken in terms of what an operating system could be.

Re: Is it really “Complex”? Or did we make it “Complicated”? (2014) [video]

#67

Post by TeMPOraL »

rjeli wrote: post #10
goatlover wrote: post #2

I wonder what a Smalltalk-like environment would look like if had been developed in the 2000s instead of the 1970s. If you could marry up the advantages of text/files, live code, visual layouts, data visualization and perhaps machine learning in the future, maybe you could come up with a huge jump in productivity and being able to handle complexity.

Mathematica gets live code, data visualization, and ML, all with a lispy+tacit+functional syntax. I find it much more integrated and easy to use compared to Jupyter notebook, although it's near useless for anything imperative -- I find myself using Jupyter a lot these days to develop one-off scripts interactively. (please, no one mention stephen)

> (please, no one mention stephen)

Why? Does he come to every place that mentions his name, like that AI guy?

Re: Is it really “Complex”? Or did we make it “Complicated”? (2014) [video]

#68

Post by hvidgaard »

defined wrote: post #57
jacquesm wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But with a huge barrier to entry. Smalltalk is at least reasonably easy to grasp for people new to programming, Erlang not so much (though it is incredibly powerful). The graphical nature of the Smalltalk environment also really helped to make it accessible. Erlang lives mostly in text terminals. I'm still not convinced of the 'image' mechanism, it's really nice to have implicit and automatic persistence but it glues…

I dispute that Erlang has a huge barrier to entry. Although there is a larger barrier than for, say, Python or Ruby, I feel that Erlang gets an undeservedly bad rap, especially given the ROI. I am no genius, but I was able circa 2008 to develop a significant production system in Erlang, while learning Erlang on the job over a period of 3-4 months. I had never programmed in a functional language before (C++ was my for…

Haskell is less about the "language" and more about the mindset. You simply have to program in a very different way, and that is hard to rewire your brain to do this. Once you learn Haskell, you will program different in other languages as well, simply because you think differently.

Re: Is it really “Complex”? Or did we make it “Complicated”? (2014) [video]

#69

Post by gkya »

defined wrote: post #57
jacquesm wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But with a huge barrier to entry. Smalltalk is at least reasonably easy to grasp for people new to programming, Erlang not so much (though it is incredibly powerful). The graphical nature of the Smalltalk environment also really helped to make it accessible. Erlang lives mostly in text terminals. I'm still not convinced of the 'image' mechanism, it's really nice to have implicit and automatic persistence but it glues…

I dispute that Erlang has a huge barrier to entry. Although there is a larger barrier than for, say, Python or Ruby, I feel that Erlang gets an undeservedly bad rap, especially given the ROI. I am no genius, but I was able circa 2008 to develop a significant production system in Erlang, while learning Erlang on the job over a period of 3-4 months. I had never programmed in a functional language before (C++ was my for…

> circa 2008 to develop a significant production system in Erlang

Is that whatsapp by any chance? ;)

Re: Is it really “Complex”? Or did we make it “Complicated”? (2014) [video]

#70

Post by arkades »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #39
gutnor wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the specific term in English comes from the common French vocabulary and are still very (very) close to the common words in the French spoken today. The common vocabulary in English comes from German origin. Actually I think you can basically speak about anything using only German origin words. In order to learn French and its vocabulary, English speaker will found a lot of similarity but from the more forma…

>In order to learn French and its vocabulary, English speaker will found a lot of similarity but from the more formal side of their vocabulary. That would lead English speaker to think French is more precise, I don't think the French have something to do with this. Worse, the French apparently teach young students to write in a way that they consider profound, and the Anglosphere considers imprecise drivel.

Do elaborate?
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